Snapchat Turns Down a Cool Three Billion Dollars

Imagine this. You’ve invented a social media app for smart phones, and it’s blown up to the tune of hundreds of millions of users. It hasn’t generated any revenue whatsoever, but it’s been valued at an extraordinarily high amount of money. Facebook swoops in and offers you $3 billion for the business. Would you turn it down? Could you? Evan Spiegel, the 23-year-old founder of Snapchat, did just that. His social media app has been valued at around $4 billion, but Facebook only offered him $3 billion for it. You can read all about it at the Huffington Post.

He decided to roll the dice and try to grow the company into an even more valuable commodity. The interesting thing is that it shows both the value of Snapchat, the weakness of Facebook and perhaps it teaches a lesson or two about human greed and pride. Either way, Snapchat is seen as having tremendous growth potential, and it is also unique in the social media world among popular sites in that it was built and designed to be completely mobile. As a result, it is in a great position to remain popular even as people’s Internet and data usage shifts more and more to mobile apps and away from traditional web browsing.

Facebook’s Weakness

On the flip side, it also highlights Facebook’s main weakness, which is that it is struggling to get young users interested in the site. While Facebook is still tremendously popular among people in their 20s and older, it is struggling to win over today’s teenagers. They seem to prefer the immediacy and ease of Snapchat. By the way, if you are unfamiliar with Snapchat, it is a photo sharing app in which the picture that has been center disappears a few seconds after it has been viewed. The same is true of videos that are sent through the app. This means that there is no digital trail of the multimedia that is shared through Snapchat. In other words, embarrassing photos cannot come back to haunt you in five years on a job interview or under any other scenario.

What to Learn

The big conclusion is to embrace mobile users and make sure that you and your business are positioned well for the future of mobile applications and Internet usage. Whether it is with your social media presence or the design of your website, you need to make sure that you are able to capitalize on the major shifts toward mobile usage.

At higher and higher rates, Internet usage is shifting from the old style – on a computer or laptop to the new – on a smart phone. That’s why you need to make sure that you are embracing social media usage and that your websites are all mobile-friendly. Otherwise users may grow frustrated when they try to access your site from a phone and leave, never to return. That’s a chance you shouldn’t take, especially when it is so easy to start using social media more effectively.

I am Yousaf, content writer about Social Media. I love to write aboud Social Media such as Twitter and Facebook. My most recent project was writing for 123Covers.net – Facebook Covers.